


i am singing now while Rome burns

by Ship_theboybands



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: An exploration, Drabble, Gen, M/M, alternative title: there is no true happy ending, ronan has issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2016-09-08
Packaged: 2018-08-13 23:15:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7989808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ship_theboybands/pseuds/Ship_theboybands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a heavy, humid darkness. Ronan feels the exhaustion in his body, behind his eyes, in the faint beginnings of a headache and the suggestion of nausea in the back of his throat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i am singing now while Rome burns

It’s a heavy, humid darkness. Ronan feels the exhaustion in his body, behind his eyes, in the faint beginnings of a headache and the suggestion of nausea in the back of his throat. He wonders what time it is. He wonders what time it is wherever Gansey and Blue and Cheng are. He feels no urgent will for sleep to come but can’t grasp why it doesn’t. His relationship with sleep is so complex, he can’t look at it too long before he’s reminded of how complex the rest of it all is, and then the strangeness and tragedy of it all piles up in his head until he forgets that he’s even a person among it all.

He debates getting up and reading for a while, or making himself a cup of one of the herbal teas Calla keeps forcing boxes of upon him. He’s grown to begrudgingly like the rhubarb ones, the warm feeling it settles within him. She’d thrust a cup of some lavender and honey thing at him the other day which had reminded him of his mother for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on- perhaps some shampoo or lotion she’d used. The thought of her now is a more distant ache, but still an ache. The physicality of it is strange. He could go outside and get some work done, use some dream lights or something. He turns his face into his pillow and inhales. His sheets could do with a wash.

He misses Parrish, suddenly; misses his restless body, all the twitching, turning, awkward parts of him. He mentally examines his own body. It’s tired, still. It doesn’t want to work in the fields, it doesn’t even want to go downstairs to make tea. He wonders why his brain isn’t tired, too. He remembers those green sleep pills K had given him. He remembers the smell of K’s burning flesh, and the violent way he had laughed. He remembers the world: a nightmare. His chest tightens. The physicality of it is strange.

He should call someone, or count sheep, or something. He misses Gansey’s constant rambling on nights at Monmouth when neither of them could sleep. It’s startling to lay in his bed at the barns and wish for Monmouth, when all his time at Monmouth had been spent longing for the barns. It’s frightening, and makes Ronan wonder if he will ever really be happy. He wonders what he really wants, and if this is it why he can’t sleep or move his body on a perfectly normal night after an objectively pleasant day. He presses his palms into his eye sockets. He numbly remembers his father’s broken body in the driveway outside, his mother in the rose garden, K on the top of his car with the dancing flames, Gansey falling like the rain.

He pushes himself out of bed. The stairs creak on his way down and it’s all his childhood and all that day he’d kissed Adam and all the nightmare the day after that. He wants to drive but the streets are full of ghosts and not the one he wants. Noah had always been dead. Ronan liked that about him, his consistency. It was more than he could say for Gansey, for his mother with her constant drifting in and out of sleeping. He finds his phone on the kitchen counter. He never liked phones, never liked the importance of his voice and his words over the line, the lack of possibility for him to truly express and explain himself.

“Hello?” Declan sounds as though he’d been sleeping. Just the sound of him, banal and a little irritated, pulls at something in Ronan’s chest. His throat hurts.

“You’re coming to visit this weekend, right?” Ronan asks, for something to ask, although he already knows the answer.

“Um, yes? Ronan, it’s four in the morning.”

Ronan rests his head against the oak of the cabinet in front of him. His whole body feels tingly. There’s work to do, today. In a few hours there will be sunlight and breakfast and work to do. He could go bug Calla and Orla and Maura. He could drive all the way to Harvard and lay in Adam’s bed while he’s at class. He could take Opal on a trip somewhere. Every thought he has seems to escape him as soon as he thinks it, and he doesn’t register the rest of what Declan is saying. He’s suddenly on fire with the memory of sensation- the demon unmaking him, Adam’s hands trying to kill him, the acid burning his skin, the coldness and cruelness and all the awful magic of the world turning against him when it had once been a thing he could trust so completely. The magic inside of him, and how it would always make things so complex. Oh god, he’s so tired, he’s just so fucking tired.

“What do I do, Declan? What do I do with it all?”

“Ronan, you sound delirious. When’s the last time you slept?”

Ronan longs for his body to collapse. He longs for light to burst through the window, to wrap around him a give him new life. The answer to the question is that he cannot remember and that thinking about it for too long reminds him of how complex the rest of it all is, and then the strangeness and tragedy of it all piles up in his head until he forgets that he’s even a person - he doesn’t want to forget.

**Author's Note:**

> title from Snow and Dirty Rain by Richard Siken


End file.
